Friday, February 27, 2009

We are in the process of wrapping up our customer survey and we wanted to thank everyone for their support, feedback, kind words and suggestions. Several hundred people replied, so I think the information we have collected is going to serve our users very well. Of the suggestions, two items were requested more frequently than any other:

1) add a column to the fuel display page that shows fuel consumption by record2) better integrate the maintenance record and reminder functionality

I am happy to say that we have listened to your feedback and have made these very useful enhancements to Ownersite as a result.

There is now a column on the fuel display page that shows your fuel consumption by record. (we have maintained this information in the past on the fuel graph and text-based fuel usage report, but not on the main page) The column will include a value only if two consecutive fuel records are both fillups. (if they are not fillups there is no way to know accurately how much fuel was used for the calculation)

In what was probably the number one request, we have enhanced how maintenance records and reminders integrate with each other. Ownersite has been able to detect if a reminder already exists for a maintenance, tire or oil change record that has been added for a couple of years now, but it was handled by popup messages, which we suspect were simply not being seen as a result of popup blockers being on by default in most browsers now. We have done away with the popup and the functionality is now handled by standard screens. Combined with the recently introduced reminder reset feature, we suspect this will accomodate the needs of 95% of our users.

Here is the existing reminder...

Now let's add a maintenance record...

Ownersite detects if there is a reminder scheduled for this service..

The reminder has been updated to reflect maintenance record...

There are a couple of caveats to the integration right now, in that it only works for odometer-based reminders. It will also do its best to detect user-defined reminders, but in some cases differences between the maintenance labels and reminder labels will not be detected.

We hope these features enhance your experience with Ownersite. We are always looking for ways to improve the product and we are listening to your suggestions. (and we have more things in the works) As always, thank you for your support!